TOKYO , Japanese videogame maker Nintendo saw its profit drop 19% in the first half compared to the previous fiscal year. This was despite the fact that people who were affected by the coronavirus pandemic at home turned to their products.
The Kyoto-based Nintendo Co. reported Thursday that it made a profit of 171.8 billion yen ($1.5billion) for the April-September period. This is down from 213 billion in the previous year.
Fiscal half sales fell 19% to 624 Billion yen ($5.5 billion). The quarterly figures were not broken down.
Nintendo, the company behind Super Mario and Pokemon, was one of the companies that got a boost by offering at-home entertainment.
This is why Nintendo had strong sales in April-September of last year’s game “Animal Crossing New Horizons”. Although it was difficult to sustain this momentum into the new year, the game was so well-received that it helped boost sales of Nintendo Switch machines.
However, the pandemic has caused a shortage in computer chips which is affecting production. Nintendo has lowered its forecasts for Switch hardware sales in the second half of fiscal year by 1.5 million units to 24,000,000
For Nintendo’s annual holidays, they are crucial. Nintendo has sold almost 9.3 million Switches worldwide to date, which includes the Switch Lite.
Overall, Nintendo’s downloads were mixed. However, mobile sales did not grow because people still enjoyed older releases.
A few new games did well, such as “The Legend of Zelda HD” which sold 3.6M units and “New Pokemon Snap,” which was reported to have sold 2.2M units.
Nintendo stated that it is banking on collaboration with U.S.-based software company Niantic in order to create a new app for smart devices called “Pikmin Bloom,” and which has been slowly distributed since last month.
Nintendo stated in a statement that they will continue to encourage more people to play this application, as well as the other applications we have released previously.
Pikmin are miniature creatures that appear in Nintendo’s games. They were created by Shigeru Miyamoto, a Nintendo star developer. Niantic is most well-known for its augmented reality mobile games like “Pokemon Go.”
Nintendo anticipates a profit in the full fiscal year ending March 2022 of 350 billion yen (3 billion USD), a 27% decrease from the previous fiscal.
